


Light at the End of the Tunnel

by Kazzy



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Gen, Introspection, Missing Scene, One Shot Collection, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-14
Updated: 2013-12-19
Packaged: 2017-12-29 09:39:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1003849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kazzy/pseuds/Kazzy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Giving voice to our lovely ladies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Ghost: Sara

**Author's Note:**

> A series of one shots/missing scenes for the women of Arrow.
> 
> Disclaimer: I own nothing

-x-x-x-

When you die and come back you are a ghost. Ghosts are the spirits of the restless dead, those who were wronged in their lifetime and now wait for justice. 

She supposes that is an apt description of what she has become. A ghost, hungry for justice and willing to pull it out of the unwary flesh of living. She cannot hurt those that hurt her but she can slake her thirst on those who would hurt others. Maybe when she’s done she can find peace.

Here seems like as good a place as any. Close enough that she can see the lights of paradise (and sometimes she creeps a little closer so she can watch them, they don’t see her – because, like all ghosts, she is invisible). But far enough that she never forgets her vengeance.

The Glades are a wreck. More than she remembers from her youth. Not that she ever came here much – her parents forbade herself and her sister from it. Not that she’d listened. It’d been a dare. No one had been hurt, and she’d only had wear a cast for a few weeks, but when her father had found out…

Well, technically she is supposed to still be grounded for that (but it’s a little hard to be grounded when you’re dead). At seventeen she’d been furious – even though it’d been three am and her parents had had every right to be upset. No one had ever accused her of being a particularly rational person – that had been more her sister’s strength.

Now she understands a little better. Of course, now the Glades are far more dangerous than they ever were. Of course, now she’s the most dangerous being in the Glades. The Glades just don’t know it yet (they haven’t seen her, they don’t know her). 

They will.

“Hey. What’s up?” She starts at the voice. But it’s not directed at her. And it doesn’t notice her. 

No one notices her. 

(because she is a ghost and no one can see ghosts)

Still, she needs to be more aware. He’s too close and too loud for her to have not noticed him. She supposes it’s being back here. Home (she doesn’t have a home), or nearby. It’s distracting. She’s found herself lost in thought. Lost in the past, haunted more than haunting. She has to keep reminding herself that ghosts don’t have family. Even if they really want them. Even if they really miss them.

The voice belongs to the red hoodie who is an alarming reminder of reality – he is not dead even if he walks in the same world as her. She’s seen him before. Three nights ago, on a street corner, he had tried to take out a drug dealer. Not because the dealer had screwed him over or because he wanted drugs and didn’t want to pay for them, but because the dealer had honestly seemed to offend him for being a drug dealer. Red hoodie had won the fight, but barely. In the end he’d scraped himself off the pavement, groaned and taken himself home.

Now red hoodie is talking to… his girlfriend? She thinks he must be. But they (ghost and hoodie) hear the screams at the same time. Loud and piercing, registering as panic.

She forgets red hoodie and circles around. There are four men and their victim. Bile burns in her stomach but she pushes her own feelings aside. She wants to rush in and put a stop to this _now_ but with four targets it’s not so straight forward. Without a plan, without knowing exactly what she’s up against she could end up hurt and then she would not be able to help to the poor terrified woman they’re attacking.

Red hoodie, though, is not quite as willing to wait. She supposes she should have realised that but the living are unpredictable. It is the second time in a short space of time he has caught her off-guard. Maybe he’s better than she thought.

Or maybe not, because he saves the girl but fails to save himself. She guesses that she should save him.

It doesn’t take much. They are stupid and slow. Surprised.

Red hoodie is not grateful for the rescue, but he does see her – which is more than most people can boast. “Where the hell did you come from?” he says.

She doesn’t answer him. Not because she doesn’t want to – though she doesn’t – but because she hasn’t spoken to anyone in so long. And there are others who are more deserving of her words – others who should hear her first. Until she finds courage she will not find her voice.

Besides, ghosts can’t speak. And she is still dead.


	2. General: Isabel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Isabel Rochev

-x-x-x-

Queen Consolidated was going to be the site of her glory. Her raison d’être. A conquest like that? Doesn’t come along every day. Or ever, really. Even crumbling into dust, the company is still the greatest one to tumble into her lap. And snapping it up and remaking it as her own – stripping it bare, building it back up? She’s lived her entire life for this moment.

This takeover was to be proof that Isabel Rochev has and is everything. It erases the last smears of her past: the girl with no father, an alcoholic mother, in and out of care. Twelve years old and she looked at the pitiful state of her world and decided that if she wanted it to change, she would have to change it herself. And she had. She had shaped her domain in her image. Taken back the pieces of her dignity that had been stolen from her – every unkind word, every lonely moment, every broken toy.

And Queen Consolidated was to be the final nail in the coffin wherein lies that broken miserable child.

But she hadn’t expected Oliver Queen. Stupid, lumbering, playboy Oliver Queen. He has nothing more than his good looks and a name. While she was slaving her way college, he was dropping out class, partying and being arrested. While she was building a name for herself as a ruthless and driven asset to her company, he was lounging around on an island in the pacific. She expected little resistance in taking his company from him – after all he has no apparent weapons, nothing with which to fight. It’s just him and his lonely hill.

The name, though; the name is more important than she remembered. 

Because she has fought so long and so hard to be the one they never see coming – until they can no longer avoid looking at her. Because she’s taken everything she’s ever needed. Because she’s made herself and her name important. She’s forgotten though, that while Oliver Queen might rule a dying empire, he’s still ruling an empire. And he has his name and he has his blood.

So there’s more to him that an empty smile and habit of disappearing. She saw what he presented to the world; saw the mask and thought it was real. She thought he was exactly what he seemed – not remembering that men like him always have secrets, always have weapons. He was born a prince and he’ll always be that prince. She’s the conquering general with the helmet and the sword and the army – she’s the undefeated. But this is still _his_ land, _his_ world. She’d been so busy forming her own, she’d forgotten that one little fact.

She underestimated Oliver Queen.

But you can bet it won’t happen again.


	3. Scapegoat: Thea

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No real timeline but envisaged as being prior to the start of season two.

-x-x-x-

People swear at her in the street.

They walk right up to her and call her names, the likes of which she’s never had directed at her in her life – most people are polite to Thea Queen even if they don’t like her. These people tell her her whole family should be dead. They tell her that she should be dead to punish her mother. They tell her that her mother deserves to die and burn in hell. They call her a monster and hold her responsible for crimes she had no part in, would have decried had she found about them sooner.

But the worst part is the way they say these words. The way they step into her space and spit them into her face or scream them from across the road, rage falling off every letter. She loses track of the epithets and words but she never forgets the venom or the hatred. People hate her for her name and she’s never been hated for anything in her life before.

In reality the very worst part is she understands the hatred. She understand why people want to share their loathing with her and why they loathe. She can fathom a world where people want her dead because they want to set a price on her life. An eye for an eye, a child for a child, her life would be their recompense. They can string her up and say their debt is paid with her blood and for her blood.

Strangely, though, they never touch her. They do not hit her, or beat her or string her up for the world to use as target practise: _‘Here hangs Thea Queen, scapegoat of Starling City._ But no matter how much rage pours off their skin and out their mouths, no matter how flushed their faces or how tight their fists curl, they never lay a finger on her.

She wonders why, even as she recoils from their anger.

Roy has a different perspective on the matter. Usually people don’t bother to approach her on the occasions she’s out with him, maybe because they’re cowards, maybe because their smart. Only three incidents happen in his presence – one of those is the only one to come to blows. When angry Roy can be intimidating because he may not pack much the way of weight and he’s not towering in height but he seems to be able to loom well. No matter what it is, as soon as he leaps to her defence, people back down. 

Laurel, too, the one time she’s with Thea when it happens, verbally shreds the young couple who stop to share their opinion. Laurel, who’s been looking increasingly fragile since Tommy death, springs into actions so fast that Thea’s not entirely sure she saw the entire incident. For the first time Thea sees the person she remembers from before Oliver disappeared the first time. And she is more grateful for the defence than she can share at least there are two people in the city who don’t consider the child of Satan.

Most of the time, though, she has no one who will speak up for her, no one who will defend her to those who abuse her, no one to feel safe behind. And even if they’ve never hit her, she’s scared that it could still happen.

She understands their hate but it still terrifies her.

-x-x-x-


	4. Alone: Laurel

**Probably doesn't need a trigger warning for depression but you can have one anyway.**

-x-x-x-

Laurel doesn’t really have much to celebrate this Christmas. Her father will be out of the hospital by then and she supposes that’s a celebration even if it’s one she could live without – it would be more cheerful if he hadn’t been in hospital at all. But it’s been so long since this has been a happy time of year for her, even last year the joy was muted by the loss of so many people.

At least this year she has her mother. Dinah will not be in Starling City for the holiday – she’s unable to get the time off work – but she’s promised to come up for a visit in January. While Laurel likes having her mom back in her life, phone calls and emails between them have taken on a decidedly worried note as apparently her parents are talking about her behind her back. While she’s grateful they’re talking at all, she’d prefer that they find something a little less painful to discuss.

“Your father worries about you. He always has.” Her mother attempts to soothe her when Laurel calls her on their interfering.

“Yes. I got that impression from the seventeen thousand lectures he gave me growing up.” She allows herself the luxury of rolling her eyes, knowing her mother won’t see it. “But I’m an adult now. Surprisingly capable of making adult decisions.” Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it. Some days it feels like she’s barely capable of tying her own shoelaces and making sure to eat.

“I worry about you, too.” Her mother’s voice is warm and soothing and Laurel has to force back tears and the urge to tell her how lonely she is all the time.

“I’m fine, Mom.” She hangs up not much more than a minute later. She wishes, irrationally and not for the first time, that Sara was still alive.

Her phone has two missed calls from Oliver within an hour of each other; the second is accompanied by a voice message where he asks her to call him when she has time. She listens to the message three times, trying to divine what he wants from less than ten words but comes up blank. She nearly calls him back but ends up deleting the message instead.

She’s tired of trying to figure out what he wants from her. She’s tired of trying to figure out what she wants from him.

Laurel can look at Oliver and see warmth and comfort. She sees safety. The night before everything went to hell, she remembers how good – how right – it felt to be with him, to know he felt for her what she felt for him. She remembers what it was like before he was lost, remembers his smile, his scent, the weight of his body, waking up in his arms. She remembers being happy, being loved (but not how those things felt).

Laurel can look at Oliver and see endless heartbreak and grief. She sees the man who slept with Sara behind her back. She sees the man who got her sister killed. The man who she slept with when she was in love with his best friend. The man whose mother she had to prosecute for the deaths of 503 innocent lives. 

She's self-aware enough to know she’s in love with Oliver. But she’s also self-aware enough to know that, even if he did want to be with her, they’re probably just due another helping of heartache.

Her phone rings and she nearly ignores the call, thinking that it’s Oliver, but the name on the screen belongs to someone else. For the space of a heartbeat she lightens, the weight pushing her down lifting from her shoulders. Everything settles back into place quickly, but she finds a peacefulness and breathing becomes easier.

Her lips curve upward. “Hello, Alderman. How can I help you today?” 

-x-x-x-


End file.
